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Bergen Kunsthall announces Willem de Rooij Farafra

Bergen Kunsthall presents Willem de Rooij Farafra, on view 2 February–31 March 2013.

Farafra (2012) is Willem de Rooij’s first sound installation. The work consists of sound recordings from a camel farm in the desert area Farafra in the west of Egypt, near the border with Libya. The 15-minute composition based on these recordings constitutes an intimate, moving aural encounter with these normally so quiet animals. Without natural enemies the animal had no natural need to develop sounds as a defence mechanism. The camels’ sounds emerge as indefinable wailing, groaning and complaining. Detached from its origin and played back in an otherwise empty room, the sound in Farafra also seems strangely human.

In Farafra de Rooij exploits the sound recording as raw material in a semantically ambivalent work where relationship between immediacy and external references is brought into play.

Willem de Rooij was born in Beverwijk, The Netherlands in 1969. He lives and works in Berlin.

Bergen Kunsthall
Rasmus Meyers allé 5
5015 Bergen
Norway
T +47 55 55 93 10
[email protected]
www.kunsthall.no

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